this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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It’s easier that everyone in the family has the same surname imo
So the kids get double surnames?
Do their kids get quadruple surnames? Where does it end?
The Spanish system is superior:
FirstName(s) Parent1LastName Parent2LastName
To clarify it's the first last name of both parents, and you can choose the order with the condition all children of same parents must have the same order.
Just pushes the issue down one generation…
Parent1 B C, Parent2 J K
...
Parent3 B A, Parent4 J H
...
Child1 and Child2 become Parent5 and Parent6
Parent5 C K, Parent6 A H
...
it seems to work pretty well (ends up preferring people with two surnames, which is an ok amount of surnames)
flamingo said, a couple comments up, that it's the first last name of both parents. So Child1 should be B J or J B, Child2 should be the same and Child3 should hence be B B, B J, J B, or J J depending on what 1 and 2 chose. Right?
The whole system collapses if you have a child with someone who has "chosen" a different family surname order.
I agree with the fact that it's easier for everyone to share the same name, especially when one parent travels alone with the kids. It's such a faff (with good reasons) if you don't have the same.
The issue is more that it's often assumed that the wife has to take the husband's name by default, rather than it being ultimately a choice between the couple.
Well wouldn’t mind if it was the other way around, but I appreciate that there is a rule, so no one gets offended when you ditch a generational name.
Couples I've known who both had double-barrelled surnames before marriage generally combined one of the names from each of their names to create a new double-barrelled name, which is what their new family and kids use. E.g. A-B marries X-Y and they become B-Y or X-A or whatever.
Sometimes, the missing parts of the surname get given to specific children as middle names. Which is a nice way of acknowledging older family members without burdening your kid with an old or boring name.
Here, there is no surname. every name is a given name. Yes, even something like Abdul Juan Michael Obama Pierre can be a full given name of one guy.
where I live, kids still usually take on their father’s name (sometimes the names are combined), but the mother almost never takes on her husband’s name. so yes, usually the mother will be an outlier in her family, last name wise.
i don’t think mothers were i live are less connected to their family because of it, tho
(altho, personally, i still don’t like the fact that it’s expected for kids to take on their father’s name, it feels like a relic of a shitty system better left in the past)
Icelandic patronyms like to have a word. You can have a 4 person family and nobody has the same "last name"
Which, like most Icelandic peculiarities, is adorable, but doesn’t scale well, especially with the pool of available names being restricted by the Naming Committee (in Iceland, it is illegal to give a child a name that is not on a list of approved names). With under 400,000 people in the country, and almost no family names, Icelandic phone directories apparently list people’s nicknames as well, so you don’t call the wrong Gunnlaugur Þóraresson by mistake.
Nicknames are not listed, but profession is. However, I find claims of it "not scaling well" to be strange given there are three million "Smiths" in the US and most of which are entirely unrelated.
Also, you can ask the committee to add new names, and they do let quite a few weird ones enter every month.
The legal use is 2 surnames, father mother, people can often recite combinations to several generations back, but that is really ancdotic, although it makes genealogy pretty straight forward
Right... As long as people were faithful (90%)
Still works, it's just the DNA that doesn't get passed along.
How? You assign your father as your "father" but your real father is your uncle. Then this wrong info is passed for generations. Where is the error correction term?
In this form, it's as useful as normal Surnames.
I agree it's so much eeasier. It's kinda weird how much stuff gets easier when you just say "that's my wife/husband". It magically erodes a lot of barriers. People rarely check, but if they do they seem to only go as far as making sure the last names match.
Wellcome to the Spaniard custom, probably older than your country 🫠
16th century.
Eh weird dig considering a lot of other European countries do it that way. It's not just the US or Canada.
It's not really a dig on the age and the custom of the US, but a dig on the incredulity with which the system that has been in place for tons of generations in Spain was presented by the commenter. Let me rephrase it, "the custom is older than the US, don't talk about it as if it were an alien concept".